Elena Kolovskaya is co-founder and director of the St. Petersburg PRO ARTE Foundation for Culture and Arts. Previously, she was director of the Arts and Culture Program at the St. Petersburg Branch of the Open Society Institute, and taught courses on arts management, art journalism, and museum design. She writes about cultural institutions and events and has edited more than thirty publications on modern art and culture. She graduated from the philological department of St. Petersburg University and did her post-graduate studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow. Elena Kolovskaya attended the 2002 planning meeting and was a faculty member of the session on Cultural Institutions in Transition: Making the Case for Culture (2003).